Digital Single Market

How to build trust in a digital world

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A sufficient level of trust remains one of the most important preconditions to guarantee a wide-spread, thriving and sustainable digital economy.

However, how can we really measure and assess “trust” in the online world, and which are the variables influencing its creation and use? What is the relation of "Trust" to "Trustworthiness" and "security"? The latter are indeed crucial components in the building of trust, and deal with the reduction of software vulnerability (software flaws and bugs) at the design and building phase.

Some argues that cybersecurity-by-design is indeed the most important aspect to take care of. However, there are other dimensions influencing trust, to which many attribute as much influence as to software security.

Trust depends also on less measurable concepts such as experience, reputation, risk awareness, and individual mind-sets, which might be cultural, social or depend on age and gender. What does it mean reaching high levels of online trust in a fast-paced changing cultural and technological environment, where these variables and the perception of risk evolve rapidly?